Hello. I wasn’t sure where to post this, so I’ll post it here.
Let me start out by saying I own the imagehost: imagecheese dot com
Right now I am paying 9.99 a month for solid hosting and get 250gb of bandwidth.
Last month I used: 120.75 Gig of bandwidth, had 9317 unique visitors, and made around $.47 using “Project Wonderful” advertising.
So far this month, I have used 142.16 Gig of bandwidth, had 3,682 unique visitors, and have made $1.50 using Adsense advertising.
By the way things are going, it looks like I am going to have to upgrade my hosting already, but I am not earning near enough to even break even for hosting costs.
My question is, how do I fix this? What is the best way to make money on an image host. Is there anything better I can use than adsense? How can I finally start making money on my image host?
Not exactly sure what you mean Jason, you can upload and share with others… I am still trying to figure out ways to monetize the site, and am thinking of using a different ad agency.
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I am very skeptical of trying to make any money on this site. I think my best option will be to try to sell it and run!
My current situation: So far this month, I have made $0.73 with AdSense, and have used 534GB of bandwidth! Soon I will need a dedicated server, but I just can’t afford that considering such low payouts!
What are my options? Should I try different ad placement? Should I try putting a more amount of ads? Should I use a different ad agency all together? Or should I just try selling the site?
Firstly, let me say well done on building a popular site! How much is your hosting costing you? I would take the financial hit for a few months to keep building the site and worry about monetising it later. Actually getting users is in many ways more useful than breaking even right now.
Many people have trouble making money with image hosting sites. When they realise they can’t, they usually try and offload them on someone else on Flippa.com. You see them all the time.
What are the chances of people who speak Japanese clicking on ads that are in English
What I think I’m going to try putting more adsense ads, then removing the “direct link” to images to make it 1 step harder for hotlinking. I will still allow hotlinking but it might be a bit harder for novice users.
I might need a PHP coder to help me out on a few things, like a gallery, if anyone is available please let me know.
With this type of site adsense has a difficult task to match the advert to the text content. Try refreshing your pages and see the different adverts that appear. I tried a few times and the adverts are not relevant to the page.
Looking at your figures of visitors and revenue I reckon that all you need is to increase the number of visitors and your adsense should grow to cover your costs. Unfortunately as you mentioned as your visitors increase then your service provider requirements increase.
I know of a similar site that has about the same number of visitors but most of the bandwidth usage comes from hot-linking. ie. other people are using the image link and not looking at the site-page. I should guess that this is happening on your site and you are giving away most of your bandwidth for free. I think that most service providers have an option to prevent hot-linking or you could test for the URL parameters and redirect to the page of your choice or display a thumbnail link to your web-page.
Your response is very reasoned and well thought out John. I appreciate that. You are most likely right, and I think what I should be doing is finding the sites that are hotlinking the most bandwidth, and deny them access.
Instead I made the wrong choice, I just upgraded my hosting to a new VPS. I am probably going to need a ton more visitors to even think about making enough to pay for the VPS!
What’s done is done for now I guess. But what I’d like to know, you said “adsense has a difficult task to match the advert to the text content.” This is the problem I am having, which advertisers are best for an image host? I am guessing rich media type ads, but which companies are best?
